
2
THE
PERSONAL HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE
sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain.
Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss-for as to
sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was in the market then-and
ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our
part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner
to spend five shillings.
I
was present myself, and
I
remember to
have felt quite uncomfortable
and confused, at a part of myself being
disposed of in that way. The caul was won,
I
recollect, by an old lady
with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated
five shillings, dl in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short-as it took
an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic, to endeavour without
any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered
as remarkable down there, that she
was never drowned, but died tri-
umphantly in bed, at ninety-two.
I
have understood that
it
was,
to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the
water in
her
lifc, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was
extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the
impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go
"meandering" about the world.
It
was in vain to represent to her
that
some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted from this ob-
jectionable practice. She always returned, with greater emphasis and
with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, "Let us
have no meandering."
Not to meander, myself, at present,
I
will go back to my birth.
I
was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or "thereby," as they say in
Scotland.
I
was a postlumous child. My father's eyes had closed upon
the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it.
There is
something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never
saw
me
;
and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that
I
have
of my first childish associations with his white grave-stone in the church-
yard, and of the indefinable compassion
I
used to feel for it lying out done
there in the dark night, when our little parlor was warm and bright with
fie and candle, and the doors of our house were-almost cruelly, it seemed
to me sometimes-bolted and locked against it.
An aunt of my father's, and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of
whom
I
shall have more to relate by and by, was the principal magnate
of our family. Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always
called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable
personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married
to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the
sense of the homely adage, "handsome is, that handsome doesH-for he
was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having
once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined
arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs' window. These
evidences of an incompatibility of temper induced Miss Betsey to pay
him off, and effect
a
separation by mutual consent. He went to India
with his capital, and there, according to a wild legend in our family, he
was once seen riding on an
elephant, in company with a Baboon; but
I
think it must have been
a
Baboo-or a Begum. Any how, from India